http://www.grid7.com/archives/86_faw-2-saber-bhatia-of-hotmail.html Build something. BIGGER. Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:19:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0 http://www.grid7.com/archives/86_faw-2-saber-bhatia-of-hotmail.html#comment-6391 Fri, 01 Jun 2007 16:06:00 +0000 http://www.grid7.com/archives/86_faw-2-saber-bhatia-of-hotmail.html#comment-6391 [...] 37s followed the path of Blogger, Hotmail and Bloglines in that BaseCamp emerged as a product after having evolved as an internal tool for solving their own problem of project management. They carved out one third of their time from client work and devoted it to refining and abstracting the application they used themselves in-house to collaborate on projects and then sold it as a subscription-based service to other developers. “It was just a flow of the application coming together and the feedback we started to get from people we respected saying, ‘I want this too!’ We thought, ‘This is something that it would be selfish to keep to ourselves.” [...] […] 37s followed the path of Blogger, Hotmail and Bloglines in that BaseCamp emerged as a product after having evolved as an internal tool for solving their own problem of project management. They carved out one third of their time from client work and devoted it to refining and abstracting the application they used themselves in-house to collaborate on projects and then sold it as a subscription-based service to other developers. “It was just a flow of the application coming together and the feedback we started to get from people we respected saying, ‘I want this too!’ We thought, ‘This is something that it would be selfish to keep to ourselves.” […]

]]> http://www.grid7.com/archives/86_faw-2-saber-bhatia-of-hotmail.html#comment-5467 Tue, 08 May 2007 21:00:11 +0000 http://www.grid7.com/archives/86_faw-2-saber-bhatia-of-hotmail.html#comment-5467 [...] I’ve been following Evan Williams’ blog for about a year now and knew him as the founder of the podcasting portal Odeo and now the popular Twitter service. I had never put it together until reading Founders that he was also the original founder of Blogger.com. What’s interesting about Evan’s story is that like the Hotmail story, the internal tool that they built to help with development of their main product became the product they sold. [...] […] I’ve been following Evan Williams’ blog for about a year now and knew him as the founder of the podcasting portal Odeo and now the popular Twitter service. I had never put it together until reading Founders that he was also the original founder of Blogger.com. What’s interesting about Evan’s story is that like the Hotmail story, the internal tool that they built to help with development of their main product became the product they sold. […]

]]> http://www.grid7.com/archives/86_faw-2-saber-bhatia-of-hotmail.html#comment-5327 Sat, 05 May 2007 19:13:42 +0000 http://www.grid7.com/archives/86_faw-2-saber-bhatia-of-hotmail.html#comment-5327 [...] We see this all the time in our world- there may be a better way of doing something but if the usablity prohibits the adoption of the more powerful technique, the potential user will flee to an inferior yet attainable solution. As I mentioned in a previous post regarding the original light bulb for JumpBox that Kimbro had while working a consulting gig for a major hotel chain, the twenty-some consultants that were already on the project prior to Kimbro’s entrance were using rudimentary methods for development. In essence there was no development infrastructure because the open source tools which were freely-available for use were too difficult to setup- their usability was prohibitively bad. Good thing for us though because this is at the heart of what makes JumpBox attractive- it eliminates that prohibitive barrier and brings those power tools that had previously been out of reach within the grasp of non-technical people. [...] […] We see this all the time in our world- there may be a better way of doing something but if the usablity prohibits the adoption of the more powerful technique, the potential user will flee to an inferior yet attainable solution. As I mentioned in a previous post regarding the original light bulb for JumpBox that Kimbro had while working a consulting gig for a major hotel chain, the twenty-some consultants that were already on the project prior to Kimbro’s entrance were using rudimentary methods for development. In essence there was no development infrastructure because the open source tools which were freely-available for use were too difficult to setup- their usability was prohibitively bad. Good thing for us though because this is at the heart of what makes JumpBox attractive- it eliminates that prohibitive barrier and brings those power tools that had previously been out of reach within the grasp of non-technical people. […]

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